1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the generation of chemical entities with defined physical, chemical or bioactive properties, and particularly to the automatic generation of drug leads via computer-based, iterative robotic synthesis and analysis of directed diversity chemical libraries.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, new chemical entities with useful properties are generated by identifying a chemical compound (called a "lead compound") with some desirable property or activity, creating variants of the lead compound, and evaluating the property and activity of those variant compounds. Examples of chemical entities with useful properties include paints, finishes, plasticizers, surfactants, scents, flavorings, and bioactive compounds, but can also include chemical compounds with any other useful property that depends upon chemical structure, composition, or physical state. Chemical entities with desirable biological activities include drugs, herbicides, pesticides, veterinary products, etc. There are a number of flaws with this conventional approach to lead generation, particularly as it pertains to the discovery of bioactive compounds.
One deficiency pertains to the first step of the conventional approach, i.e., the identification of lead compounds. Traditionally, the search for lead compounds has been limited to an analysis of compound banks, for example, available commercial, custom, or natural products chemical libraries. Consequently, a fundamental limitation of the conventional approach is the dependence upon the availability, size, and structural diversity of these chemical libraries. Although chemical libraries cumulatively total an estimated 9 million identified compounds, they reflect only a small sampling of all possible organic compounds with molecular weights less than 1200. Moreover, only a small subset of these libraries is usually accessible for biological testing. Thus, the conventional approach is limited by the relatively small pool of previously identified chemical compounds which may be screened to identify new lead compounds.
Also, compounds in a chemical library are traditionally screened (for the purpose of identifying new lead compounds) using a combination of empirical science and chemical intuition. However, as stated by Rudy M. Baum in his article "Combinatorial Approaches Provide Fresh Leads for Medicinal Chemistry," C&EN, Feb. 7, 1994, pages 20-26, "chemical intuition, at least to date, has not proven to be a particularly good source of lead compounds for the drug discovery process."
Another deficiency pertains to the second step of the conventional approach, i.e., the creation of variants of lead compounds. Traditionally, lead compound variants are generated by chemists using conventional chemical synthesis procedures. Such chemical synthesis procedures are manually performed by chemists. Thus, the generation of lead compound variants is very labor intensive and time consuming. For example, it typically takes many chemist years to produce even a small subset of the compound variants for a single lead compound. Baum, in the article referenced above, states that "medicinal chemists, using traditional synthetic techniques, could never synthesize all of the possible analogs of a given, promising lead compound" (emphasis added). Thus, the use of conventional, manual procedures for generating lead compound variants operates to impose a limit on the number of compounds that can be evaluated as new drug leads. Overall, the traditional approach to new lead generation is an inefficient, labor-intensive, time consuming process of limited scope.
Recently, attention has focused on the use of combinatorial chemical libraries to assist in the generation of new chemical compound leads. A combinatorial chemical library is a collection of diverse chemical compounds generated by either chemical synthesis or biological synthesis by combining a number of chemical "building blocks" such as reagents. For example, a linear combinatorial chemical library such as a polypeptide library is formed by combining a set of chemical building blocks called amino acids in every possible way for a given compound length (i.e., the number of amino acids in a polypeptide compound). Millions of chemical compounds theoretically can be synthesized through such combinatorial mixing of chemical building blocks. For example, one commentator has observed that the systematic, combinatorial mixing of 100 interchangeable chemical building blocks results in the theoretical synthesis of 100 million tetrameric compounds or 10 billion pentameric compounds (Gallop et al., "Applications of Combinatorial Technologies to Drug Discovery, Background and Peptide Combinatorial Libraries," Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Volume 37, Number 9, pages 1233-1250, Apr. 29, 1994).
To date, most work with combinatorial chemical libraries has been limited only to peptides and oligonucleotides for the purpose of identifying bioactive agents; little research has been performed using non-peptide, non-nucleotide based combinatorial chemical libraries. It has been shown that the compounds in peptide and oligonucleotide based combinatorial chemical libraries can be assayed to identify ones having bioactive properties. However, there is no consensus on how such compounds (identified as having desirable bioactive properties and desirable profile for medicinal use) can be used.
Some commentators speculate that such compounds could be used as orally efficacious drugs. This is unlikely, however, for a number of reasons. First, such compounds would likely lack metabolic stability. Second, such compounds would be very expensive to manufacture, since the chemical building blocks from which they are made most likely constitute high priced reagents. Third, such compounds would tend to have a large molecular weight, such that they would have bioavailability problems (i.e., they could only be taken by injection).
Others believe that the compounds from a combinatorial chemical library that are identified as having desirable biological properties could be used as lead compounds. Variants of these lead compounds could be generated and evaluated in accordance with the conventional procedure for generating new bioactive compound leads, described above. However, the use of combinatorial chemical libraries in this manner does not solve all of the problems associated with the conventional lead generation procedure. Specifically, the problem associated with manually synthesizing variants of the lead compounds is not resolved.
In fact, the use of combinatorial chemical libraries to generate lead compounds exacerbates this problem. Greater and greater diversity has often been achieved in combinatorial chemical libraries by using larger and larger compounds (that is, compounds having a greater number of variable subunits, such as pentameric compounds instead of tetrameric compounds in the case of polypeptides). However, it is more difficult, time consuming, and costly to synthesize variants of larger compounds. Furthermore, the real issues of structural and functional group diversity are still not directly addressed; bioactive agents such as drugs and agricultural products possess diversity that could never be achieved with available peptide and oligonucleotide libraries since the available peptide and oligonucleotide components only possess limited functional group diversity and limited topology imposed through the inherent nature of the available components. Thus, the difficulties associated with synthesizing variants of lead compounds are exacerbated by using typical peptide and oligonucleotide combinatorial chemical libraries to produce such lead compounds. The issues described above are not limited to bioactive agents but rather to any lead generating paradigm for which a chemical agent of defined and specific activity is desired.
Thus, the need remains for a system and method for efficiently and effectively generating new leads designed for specific utilities.